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One of the most perplexing figures in Shakespeare's tragedies is Lady Macbeth. In light of recent feminist studies, Lady Macbeth must be studied in the social and historical context of Shakespeare's own era. By comparing the situation of women at that time with the vast number of social constraints placed on them through state channels, we see these women emerging from the social ideal of the cloistered submissive wife despite the attempts of patriarchal politics to restrain their advances. / Lady Macbeth's actions are often interpreted as those of a bloodthirsty woman overstepping her social position. But Lady Macbeth is a product of a perverse society which worships the warrior-hero and dictates the importance of being a man, "broody, bold, and resolute". Interestingly, contrary to many interpretations, Lady Macbeth never attempts to be anything but a submissive, devoted wife. She and her husband embody the paradoxes inherent in their culture.

This dissertation is an investigation of a creative pedagogical approach formulated to teach the Shakespearean play in a KwaZulu-Natal public high school, namely Grove End Secondary in Phoenix, Durban. The study explores how my formulated creative pedagogy for teaching The Merchant of Venice (1980) functions as an alternate creative teaching methodology to the current pedagogical approach, namely the text-based approach, which appears not to acknowledge the performative element inherent within Shakespearean plays. This study argues that through creative learning processes such as drama in education, creative drama, experiential learning, group dynamics and playmaking, learners can engage the performative aspect within the plays. The study also argues that creative learning processes can diminish the apprehension with which learners currently approach Shakespearean play study, since creative processes stimulate the learners’ imaginative ideas, as opposed to the educator-centered text-based approach, which requires little or no input from the learners during the learning process. Through the implementation of the creative pedagogy with eighteen learners from Grove End Secondary, the research aimed firstly, to evoke a positive attitude change from learners towards Shakespearean play study and secondly, to guide the learners towards a better understanding of the Shakespearean play narrative and Shakespearean language. The research was conducted through classroom action research. Research methods included data collection of journals, surveys, and questionnaires that were analysed throughout the course of the case study. Outcomes of the continuous data analysis reflected upon during the case study resulted in the adaptation of the creative pedagogy to suit the learners’ needs. The qualitative nature of this research led to findings which reveal that the creative pedagogy is an effective methodology for teaching Shakespearean plays, but is problematic when trying to integrate the educational aims of the creative pedagogy, with the constraints and structures of the current curriculum and public school system. The research also produces data which can benefit future inquiry into the creative teaching of Shakespearean plays in KwaZulu-Natal public high schools. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2013.

Shakespeare's history plays are not merely benign representations of various historical figures and events but the site of political, cultural, and ideological contestation at the time of their performance. Richard II documents two divergent theoretical approaches to sovereignty which are more applicable to the political climate in Shakespeare's time than Richard's. In this essay, I read this play through the lens of various political tracts and historical tendencies dominant in late Elizabethan England. Though such an analysis might best be understood as historical materialist in orientation, I offer a contextual analysis of various modes of early modern political thought drawing variously upon theoretical precepts associated with new historicism as well as the 'ideas in context' school associated with Quentin Skinner, among others. / Such an analysis reveals a shift in the mode of theoretical discourse. Richard's divine-right/monarchical approach to sovereignty based in an overarching ecclesiastical power base gives way to Bolingbroke's pragmatic and consensus driven politics. This shift mirrors the movement in late 16$ rm sp{th}$ and early 17$ rm sp{th}$ century England from traditional religious arguments offered by Richard Hooker, John Whitgift, and residually by James I to a more secular political discourse inaugurated by Machiavelli and his English adherents and symptomatic of the reign of Elizabeth herself. Roughly speaking this modulation follows the pattern of paradigm shifts in the physical sciences exposed by Thomas Kuhn's influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The emergent theory, while marking a rapid and overwhelming reorientation of the terms and initial presuppositions of political discourse, draws in many crucial respects on the accrued tenets of the outgoing paradigm. The play therefore acts as a retroactive representation of a political reformation which occurred much later than the events depicted in the play.

The purpose of this study is to examine the imagery of time, identity, order, and power in William Shakespeare's Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V in order to demonstrate that the dramatist's use of imagery both emphasizes the themes of the plays and frequently develops the characterization of those who people the stage: Shakespeare's skillful artistic technique of incorporating imagery into the dramatic text emphasizes, reinforces, and develops both theme and characterization. The terms "image" and "imagery" refer exclusively to figurative language, excluding the constrictive definitions of visual imagery, wordpictures, and iterative words. In this procedure, I recognize that figurative language involves the process of comparison in which each image contains two parts which have been variously called the subject-matter and object-matter, the minor term and the major term, and the vehicle and the tenor. My analysis deals with the effect achieved by the interaction between the two parts of each image. The major sections of the paper are organized, first, according to the image patterns of time and identity and order and power and, second, by individual play.The imagery of time and identity illustrates that these plays are more than dramatizations of political ideas and philosophies. The dramas demonstrate man's continual relationship with time. Because time is a force which affects all human beings, part of man's identity is determined by his position on the wheel of time. More important, however, than man's position on the wheel of time is the behavior of men and the use which they make of the time given to them. The Henriad portrays King Richard II as a human being who wastes time and fails to recognize its force and significance until it is too late for him to restore the order which he has violated. In taking advantage of time, Richard's successor, Henry IV, imagines that an adequate amount of time exists for him to compensate for having taken Richard's crown. However, Henry IV spends his entire reign trying to settle civil disruption and to change Prince Halls behavior. Finally, the cycle of Henry IV comes to an end without his having been able to restore order to his country. The disordered time which was initiated by Richard and Bolingbroke continues throughout the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V. The position of king which Bolingbroke so eagerly seeks and illegally achieves brings him little happiness and finally destroys him. In a world subject to time and fortune, the positions, roles, and identities of men change. The imagery depicts the disordered segments of time and the subsequent effects in the lives of men, all of which occur because of man's interference in the cycle of time and his violation of its order. No matter what his specific role at any time, man's identity, as the imagery illustrates, is determined by the fact that he is no more than a mortal human being with certain moral capacities. Who he is clearly rests upon his use of these in the time given to him. The Henriad demonstrates that each person, from king to common soldier, fulfills the role of human being in the diverse ways he recognizes and meets his human obligations.

The sacramental rhetoric and iconography of the Lancastrian Tetralogy significantly contribute to our recognition that the theological center of Shakespeare's historical drama is distinctively Anglican. Shakespeare (whether he personally was an Anglican churchman) invokes in the Lancaster plays the symbols and speech definitive of the Protestant Reformation in order to illustrate dramatically the Crown's convictions of the transcendent purpose of the English nation in human history, especially as that purpose had been defined by Tudor historiography. Shakespeare's histories demonstrate a conviction, broadly conceived and illustrated, of faith in the providential destiny of a nation whose very birth and sustenance in adversity form a sign of its election to grace and divine favor.Furthermore, Shakespeare's Lancaster plays, by continuing the didactic tradition of the medieval stage, embrace the precepts of Tudor monarchy and apply those principles of government and Reformation theology to the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare's histories therefore interpret history; they do not recollect it--except in the spirit of sixteenth-century imagination, harmonized with legend and myth. Consequently, the Lancaster cycle of histories constitutes a unified dramatic quartet in which history as fact is eschewed in favor of history as progressive revelatory sign, a vision enabled by mythography derived from the emblems and rhetoric of the sixteenth-century Anglican Christian tradition. / Department of English

In this dissertation I develop and theorize an approach to Shakespearean character. I focus on the ways in which characters talk about knowing others and being known; in other words, this is an approach to characters who are themselves approaching characters. The plays I treat in detail are Coriolanus and Hamlet. The words characters in these plays use when they explain their decisions, avoid explaining their decisions, talk about others' decisions, or try to expose others' secrets, are often position-and-movement words. I argue that characters use for these purposes words related by wordplay to the postures and gestures involved in crucial rituals (the "custom of request" in Coriolanus, the fencing match in Hamlet). At the same time, this is a metacritical project: I deal with approaches and attitudes of Shakespeare interpreters. How do we stand in relation to each other? How do editors and critics echo and transform the characters' postural/gestural language, and what are the implications of these echoes and transformations? Why is it worthwhile to work toward awareness of these echoes and transformations? In an extensive introductory section I theorize the kind of reading practiced here as an ethical practice-a practice intended to modify what Michel Foucault calls the rapport a soi. / The project's main original contribution is its way of re-conceiving the relationships among several currents in Shakespeare studies. My discussion engages with recent work in textual studies. Examples include work by Leah Marcus and Paul Werstine. It also engages with historically informed treatments of wordplay. Examples include work by Margreta de Grazia and Patricia Parker. And it addresses work that could be said to be part of a move in the field toward "ethical criticism." Examples include work by Stanley Cavell and John Guillory. As well, my discussion engages with psychoanalytic criticism by Marjorie Garber, Coppelia Kahn, and others. While I do not consider myself a psychoanalytic critic, the affinity my approach has with psychoanalysis has to do with my interest in making explicit some of the implications of unreflectively chosen metaphors, word associations, etc. The implications that concern me most are those that have to do with the ways interpreters relate to each other.